Interactive Digital Lessons with Pear Deck

If you haven't yet heard about Pear Deck....get ready for a paradigm shift.

This is a tool that almost forces you into some best practices for using tech in the classroom.

Pear Deck is a tool that takes your digital presentations in Google Slides or PowerPoint Live and let's you add interactive elements and embedded formative assessment with a variety of different questioning tools.

When you use Pear Deck, students log in to your presentation anonymously or with a Google or Microsoft account and a code and they access the presentation from their own device.

They follow along with you and interact with your presentation. You can also let students control their pace through the lesson and use this as an asynchronous presentation tool.

So how does Pear Deck level up your digital lessons?

It involves all students.

With each interactive question and activity, every student responds. This gives every student a voice in the classroom, not just the ones brave (or fast) enough to raise their hand. By bringing in space for every perspective, you have the opportunity to shift the balance of class discussions and student input.

It records data.

So now you have every student participating. You can already accomplish this with thoughtful discussion techniques like Think-Pair-Share activities where all students get the chance to speak. But Pear Deck lets you collect student responses and view them during the lesson to spark conversation or inform your lesson. Or you can view them after the lesson to plan for the future. You have created an opportunity for everyone to share, make the most of it by collecting and analyzing their thoughts.

It offers different entry points for students.

One way I like to use Pear Deck is by making open-ended questions on drawing slides. Instead of forcing students to write text, sometimes it's ok to let them communicate in whatever form works best for them. On a drawing slide, that could still be text. But it could also be a drawing or even emojis. For English Language Learners or visual learners or students with writing difficulties, you can give them another way to contribute and communicate.

Earlier this week I got the opportunity to join Apps Events to share more about Pear Deck and demo some ways I've used it with my students. If you want to see more about Pear Deck take a look!

My session on Pear Deck starts at 1:27:00, but there are some awesome sessions you should know about too. So do yourself a favor and check out the other sessions as well!